Drones – They Make Life A Lot Easier

The lot of the Armchair Recce Specialist has certainly become easier. Gone are the days of poring over magazines, journals and company reports, trying to establish if there were any images of what a business was doing. Not only does the internet and ChatGPT provide immediate results, but marketing departments and their use of drones, provides a whole different view of the outside and more critically, the inside of their facilities.

The advent of Google Earth proved a boon, well known for exposing security weaknesses that were once well hidden. Google Earth, allows routes of entry to be explored, vegetation and other possible cover from view features to be seen and potentially, critical plant and machinery to be identified. 

That external picture was further built on by the use of digital mapping from Ordnance Survey and Google Street View providing ground level imagery of buildings, including the CCTV that it has, the external alarm detectors fitted and if the vehicle barrier just happened to be up at the very time Google passed.

Drones – A Boon To The Armchair Recce Specialist

Although all this has been extraordinarily good for the Armchair Recce Specialist, it normally left the question, “What does the inside of the building look like”? While it is not impossible to get inside most buildings, it is normally better to know what might be faced once in there or in fact where a particular piece of equipment is sited. It is in this area that the advent of the drone has proved a positive boon, not that the Armchair Recce Specialist actually goes outside to use them, but the fact that they now seem to be widely used within company promotional videos, with the videos themselves being available on the net.

The images tend to start with a high level view of the facility with the drone then flying down and into the building through large vehicle entrance doors. Flying about like a demented Scottish West Coast midge, the drones draw out imagery rather than blood. That imagery, in a lot of cases, seems to be unguarded, with the internal structure of buildings being seen. 

The positioning of external doors might be obvious, but what can also be seen is the use of internal CCTV systems and the internal intruder alarm detectors covering those doors. Added to this, as perhaps images from hand held stills cameras are cut in, is the type of internal doors and their locking systems. 

OSINT – Drones Are A Dream

As a security consultant, I do tend to watch promotional videos, not for the marketing expertise of the company, but for how they unwittingly giveaway information that should remain confidential. Whether drones have increased the number of promotional videos is difficult to know, but what they seem to have done, as getting impressive imagery is easier, is probably to have increased the amount of information that is given away. Of course this does not mean that any business is about to be robbed, but what it does do is to clearly show the level of security awareness that any business might have.

Protection – It’s Business Wide

The protection of an organisation is the responsibility of everyone, not just the security team, but it is the team who are responsible for advising on the threat. It is up to them to talk to all departments and to be aware of what is being produced and made public, which might inadvertently give away sensitive information. Once the information is on the internet, it’s there forever and so is the compromise that might have taken place.

RedLeaf Consultancy – Advising Clients

RedLeaf Consultancy is a consultancy which is primarily concerned with advising clients on how security might impact on the risks that they have have and from that generating solutions.